Ravenous (Taint of the Gods #1)

55. RHYDIAN

55

RHYDIAN

I was greeted by Lily’s smiling face the moment I walked into MedCom . She had that pregnancy glow. So it was only right I cursed myself for being the reason it vanished. I expected her to crumble when I spoke the words. When I told her Jae was dead. But she didn’t. Not until she saw his body lying in their bed where I placed him upon our return.

Her wails of anguish could be heard in every carriage.

“It is not your fault Rhydian,” my grandfather said squeezing my shoulder in an attempt to console me, trying to halt the guilt he knew I felt. “Veliah claims us all in the end.”

But it didn’t matter what anyone said. I’d seen it in my mother when my father died. And again right before Jordry had turned her. No words of comfort would ever dull that kind of grief.

I felt the familiar and comforting beat of a heart and turned to find Rieka entering the control room accompanied by Saska and his partner Emil. They’d all spent the day in MedCom with the rest of their bunkmates.

Hentirion had suffered what Preans called The Torpor. A result of a Kindling exerting so much heat that their body must shut down to recover and heal. Sal had assured everyone that he would be fine, and that he would wake up when his body was ready.

Farox on the other hand, in the course of trying to get the old man back to the safety of the station had been cornered by two hunters who favoured one-on-one combat with their prey. The Torvian had killed them both but his ankle was broken, his facial membrane was ripped open when his jaw was dislocated, and his arm had been internally severed from the joint. Yet somehow, he’d managed to obtain two supply caches and remain conscious long enough to drag the old Kindling scholar across half the city and to the safety of the station.

The only reason Rieka wasn’t there now was because of the code.

The moment she saw me she pushed right through the crowd and pulled me into her arms. I buried my nose in her sweet-scented hair.

“Shall we begin?” my grandfather asked, pulling her attention from me. Rieka glanced at him from over her shoulder, her gaze lingering for a moment before she let distance fall between us. The crowd which had been forming in the carriage for the better part of an hour quickly fell silent as I approached the console, Rieka by my side.

I went through the motions as I had done for years, typing in the sequences of buttons that my ancestors had determined over centuries until I had called up the screen that controlled the passengers’ collars.

The keypad appeared before us, the sinuous Gods’ Tongue characters spread out in a grid below the incomplete code. I moved my hand towards the keys and hesitated.

Sensing my nerves, Rieka moved up beside me. “ Would you like me to do it? ” her inner voice softly asked.

“No. I need to do this. ” I took a breath and looked at the disk in my hands and compared it to the phrase on the holographic. I found the missing character on the keyboard for the first word, touched it and slid it over to the incomplete word within the circle. The image shifted to accommodate the new character. I did it again for the next set of characters, locating the missing symbol on the keyboard and placing it on the incomplete script. On the eleventh character, Rieka suddenly stopped my hand.

“Not that one. It’s the wrong letter.” I looked closer at the two characters and realised she was right. There was a single stroke of difference which made them nearly indistinguishable from one another. I found the correct one and placed it in the circle.

Murmurs started to pick up behind me, but I willed myself to ignore them.

I'd entered nearly as many symbols as were already on the holographic when my hand started to shake.

Rieka pressed herself into my side, her hand moving to rest on my back. I felt myself calm instantly. Three more. Just three. I keyed in the first.

Then the second.

Upon keying the final character, the console beeped, and the circle enlarged, levitating in the air before me. “What does it say?” I asked Rieka as she gazed up at the code.

“It’s a riddle.” Rieka raised her hand to the holograph and began to rotate the image anti-clockwise. Whether she intended for me to hear or not, as she translated the phrase aloud, her inner voice spoke the Gods' Tongue into my mind.

“Vimlaagol ark afmishagta,”— “I am the absence of constraints,”— “t'eimol nu gyavrat' voeraag kha leshta mohravna t'eima vnakhyat' muun.”— “the ability to choose yet not all who seek me out can truly have me.”— “Vint' an?”— “What am I?”

“Freedom.”

All eyes turned to my grandfather, the word spoken by the senior councilman, by the uncrowned King of Kensilla, stirring the crowd.

I turned to Rieka and asked her to key in the answer. She stepped forward and in a matter of seconds had entered the word. The moment she keyed in the last symbol, a new button appeared. Rieka stepped back and turned her attention to my grandfather.

“Kosha, would you do the honours?”

He closed the distance to the console in long strides, the weight of our burden heavy on his shoulders. He raised his hand and pressed the button that now glowed beneath the riddle. A series of beeps sounded out from the control station, the lights of the panels flashing in quick succession. The Gods’ Tongue characters vanished only to be replaced by Old Kenar text.

NO!

My grandfather read the words aloud, his tone solemn.

“Deactivation incomplete. Bio-organic component still required. Please try again.”

The carriage erupted into shouts and outbursts of rage. I squeezed the disk so hard I could feel the metal slicing into my palm.

There had to be something I could do.

I left the control room.

The notes in my office. I had hundreds if not thousands of notes on the Royal Rail. The last king had left hundreds of books in the library about Kensillan technology at the peak of the last monarchical century. There had to be something in there on bio-organic codes.

But no matter where I looked, there was nothing. I could feel my panic begin to set in as I poured over the papers on my desk. My hands shook so violently from anger I could barely read let alone think straight. The office door opened and someone said my name but it wasn’t important, they weren’t important right now. Not as much as this, not as much as freeing them from the train. I had to free them. I had to free her.

“RHYDIAN!”

Hard hands grasped at my face, forcing me to look at the owner. Pale eyes stared at me in fear. Not for their own life but for mine. Haunting eyes that reminded me of the ring around the sun when the moon swallows it, a golden glow around a pale moon.

“Rieka?”

“Yes,” she whispered, her thumb stroking my cheek. “Please stop Rhydian. You’re going to hurt yourself.”

I reached for her face, wiping at the tears that had fallen. “I have wronged you,” I told her as my body threatened to break from my control.

Her gaze was searching, unable to comprehend my words. “What are you talking about?”

“In the slave camp. When I told them you were human. I knew they would execute you. And I told them anyway.”

I waited for her to drop her hands, to release me. Because I knew that when she did I would lose all sense of being. I was nothing and no one without this cause. It was in my blood, in my mother’s blood. My father had died protecting our people all for a chance of one day being free. I had spent my life trying to do the same. I had done what no other person in five centuries on this train had done before. And it still wasn’t enough.

“Rhydian.” My name left her lips in a whisper. Those grey tempests looked upon me with such love.

How can she look at me that way?

I had left her there in the camp after telling the slavers she was human, knowing that they would hang her. I had believed death would be better than the alternative.

And I had the audacity to think I was worthy of her love.

Rieka wasn’t the monster. I was.

I opened my mouth to speak but her inner voice silenced me. “I forgive you.”

Rieka cupped my cheek.

“Why?”

It makes no sense.

“Because you will not forgive yourself.” Rieka then stepped back and slowly lifted her hands. She seemed to stutter out a breath before—to my utter astonishment—she signed my name in Seja.

“Rhydian, I see you. You are a friend and a brother. You are a son. A leader. You love cold tea and scolding hot kharee. You sing in the shower when you think no one is around and you always lie in our bunk thirty minutes before I do just to make sure the bed isn’t cold because you know I like that.

“You would rather skip a meal to ensure someone else eats than eat it yourself. You’ve never missed a talent show and always volunteer for the children even if you look like an idiot. You regularly risk your life for people who probably don’t appreciate it and ask nothing from them in return. You’ve hidden your true self from your friends for years because you’re scared they won’t accept or love you for who and what you are. You are a selfless and gentle man. And you made me feel safe when I thought the world incapable of it.”

Her hands began to shake as she continued to sign. “Rhydian, if you cannot see your worth then I offer myself. I give you my eyes, so that you may see yourself as I do. I give you my voice so that you will hear every day that you are good, and kind, and loved. I give you my body so that you will know the touch of devotion. And I give you my heart. Because I trust no one else with it. It is yours to do with as you wish.

“You act like you are alone in this cause, but you are not. Share your burdens. Let me bear some of the wei—”

I caught her hands, stilling their movement. My body trembled as her words sunk in, words that voiced a terrifying desire I’d never admitted aloud.

“Where did you come from? You are a trick the gods are playing on me. A figment of my dreams brought to life.”

Rieka raised a hand to cup my cheek. “I only know of one god who plays with dreams. And he does not share his creations.” Her fingers fell to my lips in a feathered caress.

The words slipped from my tongue. “Tell me you love me?”

Rieka’s reaction was instant. Frozen as if the question had commanded the world to stop. A dread fell upon me, anchoring my entire existence to the space between her heartbeats as I waited for her answer. My world started and ended with her, every breath I took was because of her, for her and should she wish it of me, I would stop my heart for her.

Rieka looked up at me, those tempestuous greys churning. Then she smiled. “You don’t ask for much do you?” A small chuckle escaped those beautiful lips. “I hate you, Alistair Rhydian Imaris Kanyk.”

Then as if it was the easiest thing in the world after everything we had just been through, she kissed me.

The world faded away until there was nothing left but the sensation of her lips on mine, of her body pressed to mine, of the sound of her heart against mine. Beating with mine. Nothing mattered so long as Rieka was by my side. So long as she loved me, I would never stop fighting for our freedom. For her freedom.

The office door burst open and Eleen skidded to a halt at seeing us. Her expression was one of terror. I immediately knew something was wrong. I begged her to tell me.

“It’s Lily. Sal’s had to induce labour.”